Abuse

April 28, Hangzhou

In addition to my metaphysical interests, which are all too self-evident, I spend a lot of time contemplating the intersection of spiritual questions with ordinary life.

This morning, I made the decision to terminate an on-line friendship — if that is the word for it — that I’ve pursued for nearly 20 years. The "friendship" was with an individual in the Gurdjieff work who is perhaps one of the most intelligent people I know.

 Nonetheless, as the years went on, this individual became increasingly prone to directing personal insults at me in our exchanges whenever they disagreed with things I said. Eventually, these insults became more profound and unprovoked. They were, in a word, abusive. It seemed that every conversation eventually reached a point where these personal insults arrived in my mailbox as a response to what I felt was fairly measured commentary and exchange. 

I woke up at three am this morning contemplating the implications. If, after many decades of inner work, a person's style of exchange with others involves personal abuse intended to devalue, demoralize, and otherwise insult the other— is this acceptable?

In my experience, this is the opposite of a good result. Yet those who engage in such behavior (I've certainly seen more than a few in my time)  package it in a wide range of self-serving justifications which make it seem quite ordinary and even necessary to them. This particular friendship I’m ending is not the first one I have ended for the same reasons. I recently had to block an individual on Facebook who, while deeply dedicated to the Gurdjieff work, engages in bizarre rants of various kinds that became equally personal and unacceptable to me. 

I am grown truly weary of such abusers.

I’ve had a lot of experience with abuse; more, I'd venture to say, than most people I know. I spent 16 years in a marriage to (at the time) a very deeply troubled woman that left my children and I with PTSD which has not, even after 17 years of recovery, completely healed. It may never do so.  The things that were said and done are too horrific to recount here; as with alcoholism, these matters are impossible to explain to those who have never been afflicted with them.

One of the difficulties with the abused is that we continue to try and have positive, intelligible, and sound relationships with the abuser, believing that because they are apparently intelligent human beings, eventually they will see that this kind of treatment isn’t acceptable. I did that myself for years; and so I’m well familiar with the psychological mechanisms that drive it.  They are certainly, like my alcoholism, still active in me, despite years of recovery. Many of the readers who encounter this material may also be familiar with this problem: abuse of this kind leaves scars that educate, but never quite heal.

The point is that one has a right to terminate a relationship if it becomes abusive in this way. And perhaps it’s more than a right; perhaps it’s a personal duty. Individuals who develop negative forces in themselves that they wield in an attempt to damage others, whether intentionally or otherwise, may be a little helpful to our work — but not very. Nothing about the search for God and inner truth obliges us to expose ourselves to repeated mistreatment. 

Now, the results of going through abusive relationships can be very helpful spiritually, there is no doubt — but there is a moment in any such relationship of inflicted suffering where legitimate action is to just call it quits and get out. One does this for one’s own psychic and spiritual well-being.

I don’t terminate relationships lightly. I reach this point after a long struggle, when it becomes apparent that the other individual is never going to change, and in fact believes quite firmly that everything they say and do is right. They may have a ”right” to their own opinions; they may have a right—just as I do, equally flawed being that I am— to their own egoism, their own ideas, and even their own arrogance. But they don’t have a right to say hateful and horrible things to me over and over again. 

No one has the right to do that to another person.

Nonetheless, this kind of thing is done inside spiritual works all the time, inside the Gurdjieff work just as much as it is in other works. We needn’t dwell at any great length on the other horrid forms of abuse that take place in spiritual organizations, which are manifold. What we should dwell on is our right as those seeking to act as upstanding, kind, compassionate, and intelligent human beings to renounce such behavior and engage in a relentless inner struggle not to do such things ourselves.

 In the Lord’s prayer, one of the lines is “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” In this particular instance, temptation can be cast as the wish to harm others with our words; and deliverance from evil as the wish to stay away from those who behave this way. It’s a being-duty as creatures attempting to regenerate an inner spiritual wholeness both not to harm others in this way (or, indeed, in any way) and to stay away from those who do so. As I’ve explained once already, I will say again: they are entitled to whatever behavior they wish to engage in; but I don’t have to participate in it with them.

As the Lord is my witness, I have done more than my share of harm in this life. As I grow older this burden weighs on me more and more heavily and I look back at those who I've harmed, in whatever way, with a deep and abiding sorrow for my actions, my inattention, and my insensitivity. 

I did these things: I cannot expunge them. There is no way to scrub such inner sin clean; it's written in the flesh. This indelibility is what ultimately lands beings on the Holy Planet Purgatory.

I have not done well enough in any way, at any time, and in any sense. This burden of sin (as we call it in the Episcopal Church) has become, in a word, intolerable — which is exactly the word that’s used in the confessional. 

I need to sense this with all three of my parts in order to understand my being in a more intelligent, compassionate, and organically physical way.

It’s been said by some that the point of the Gurdjieff work has always been to produce a decent human being. Somehow, for me, the culmination of these many decades of work concentrates itself around a kernel of love and compassionate understanding that ought to help restrain me from these organically reprehensible actions that the devil in me justifies. While it is absolutely and  verifiably true that the Kingdom of Heaven is within, even if we sense it, we still walk with one foot on the edge of hell. 

Hell touches Heaven; and it touches us not in some metaphysical space, but in ourselves. We need to see that, in my experience, with more and more clarity as we grow older, lest we crystallize inwardly in what are sometimes called “bad results.”

 I would urge my readers— those of you interested in examining inward responsibility of this kind—to consider your ways. I believe we should—yes, should, it is imperative— learn, as best we can, to restrain ourselves from making hateful statements towards others or even about others, and instead find every way that we can to carefully examine the place within us that that temptation arises and make every inward effort to root it out as ruthlessly as we can. 

This can, in my experience, only take place if I'm willing to challenge every single instance in which I have a wish to say hateful, cruel, or dismissive things to other people. If mindfulness has a purpose, other than just being here — which is in my estimation hardly enough, or even the meager beginning of something — it's to be mindful enough not to inflict harm like this on other people.

Friends are tremendously valuable to us. We should honor our friendships with intelligence and compassion; and, even if they act otherwise, we should equally try to find a way to honor our enemies, which will always be at great cost and against our impulses. 

Life is a tremendously precious thing, forever in danger of being destroyed from within. 

And that destruction, while we may wish to blame it on others, always begins in ourselves and of ourselves. 

If we don’t see that, though we be geniuses, we're still blind.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.